Freddy Krueger had the third-best melty face in film. It's nice to see him thriving

I had my first nightmare about Freddy Krueger before I'd even seen A Nightmare on Elm Street. I was, it should be admitted, an ocean-going wuss (and I still am). So just hearing about the movie and seeing images of this malevolent, claw-handed creature who could appear in your nightmares . . . well, it had a very profound effect on me.

A remake of the original Krueger film is out on Friday, co-produced by Michael Bay (who was also behind last year's remake of Friday the 13th), and with Jackie Earle Haley taking the role made famous by Robert Englund's distinctive nose. We are told to expect – aren't we always? – something "darker" and "profoundly disturbing". Is that chill on my spine fear – or embarrassment?

It's nice to see Freddy thriving. He was always one of life's runners-up; hence, perhaps, the bad temper. He had the second-best fedora in popular culture, after Indiana Jones. He also had the second-best stripy jumper, behind Charlie Brown. And he had the third-best melty face, following the villain in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the toxic waste victim in Robocop.

Then, obviously, Freddy had the second-best claws. If the competition is Wolverine, whose unbreakable claws are made of the hardest substance in the universe fused to an adamantium skeleton, then attaching some sharpened butter knives to an old gardening glove was never going to cut it.

But Freddy had spirit. He had gumption. He had a sense of the grotesque and a drive to revenge himself on the good-looking, smug, conformist types who always took first place on the podium.

A Nightmare on Elm Street was basically a remake of Oklahoma! without the gingham and the awful songs. Freddy stood in for Jud, the saturnine farmhand who, scorned in love and rejected by the community for being poor and ugly, turns to hatred and vengeance. Freddy's hellish boiler room – where he was burned alive by white-collar vigilantes – is no more than Jud's smokehouse reborn in 1980s suburbia.

Compared with his rivals in horror-film serial murder – Mike Myers in Halloween (a vengeful product of family dysfunction) and Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th (a tetchy, lumbering hockey-mask accessoriser with a priggish streak) – Freddy is a countercultural figure. "Hippy" is perhaps too sunny a word for a serial child-murderer sent to hell by a gang of concerned parents, but his was cut from a different cloth than these other slasher franchises.

The killers in Friday the 13th and Halloween cover their faces. Freddy doesn't have a face in the first place. Neither of the other two speaks a word, but Freddy won't shut up. He's an individual, rather than the embodiment of some abstract nemesis.

For the other two, the means of dispatch are all variations on the old twist-off-head, put-pole-through-chest routine. Their favourite targets are fornicating cheerleaders and other teenagers having too much fun. Freddy lives in the dream-world, and shapes it around him. He wants to play with the kids as much as he wants to kill them. His murders are trippy. Kids are chewed up by their beds and spat on to the ceiling, or snogged to death, or turned into a comic and made to bleed ink.

A Nightmare on Elm Street also shows, disastrously, the way these horror franchises shift genre. In the course of the series, Freddy lurches from terrifying to camp, as his murders turn from scary-surreal to silly-surreal. He kills a kid by sucking him into a Mario-style platform game on an eight-bit console. He is served a meatball pizza covered with tiny screaming human heads.

In his book about horror writing, Danse Macabre, Stephen King writes about the "thudding humourless tract" school of horror, singling out The Exorcist as an example. But Freddy's 1980s adventures on Elm Street went too far in the opposite direction: he crossed that boundary between fear and laughter more explicitly than any other cinematic villain. And in so doing, Freddy diluted what started out as a very, very scary concept indeed.

So can Freddy ever go back to being straightforwardly scary? His creator Wes Craven has, since Freddy's 1980s heyday, produced the self-knowingly comedic Scream films. The "rules" of horror have changed, and Freddy as an icon is now funny-scary, rather than the straight scary-scary figure who scared the willies out of my younger self.

The grindingly humourless torture-porn of films like Captivity and Hostel now occupies the place slasher movies once held. The remake is asking us to take both Freddy and a Michael Bay film seriously. It's a big ask. But still, we can dream.